Coming Down
by narcolepticbadger
Summary: Nicky gets out of max. Lorna waits. Season 3 spoilers but heavily disregards canon.


She remembered glass and water and saying _I love you, too_ to Nicky's back as the guards led her away, and there was a finality in every piece of it.

Lorna had reached the end of days and – miraculously, though it felt like anything _but_ – lived through them.

In the beginning it had meant crying and taking more pills and fitting herself back into the empty spaces where Nicky was supposed to be. Living in the absences, which (she imagined) was something like dying except everyone kept pulling her out of bed to make sure she ate and reported to work, surrounded her with sound and warmth and things rescued from Nicky's bunk, and if this was kindness, well, she thought she might rather find the knife-edge underneath it.

Red called her _dushenka_ and gently slapped her across the head, and she never asked what it meant. They both knew she wasn't talking to Lorna, anyway.

And then, irrevocably, the weight of Nicky's absence – like memories of her and memories of a time _before_ her – began to lessen, and Lorna didn't have it in her to resist.

Nicky's clothes became another set of slightly-too-big sweats. She brushed her hair straight and buried her lipstick in the yard, not bothering to mark the spot because she would not return, and, when anyone asked about it, she shrugged and said that Red had stopped smuggling her brand in, and that was that.

(It was not a lie. It was never a lie if you believed it, and Lorna believed and believed and believed until her teeth hurt.)

She welcomed gossip and movie nights and the other little distractions, the ebb and flow of prison life, that kept her head buzzing just enough to allow time to pass, and she might have been surprised when her release date came up if not for the four hundred and eighty-six lines she'd marked on notebook paper – and no one could claim she hadn't felt each one, each count against them and the goodbye they had never had.

Purgatory was long, so long, and she didn't know what to fear more: that it would never end, or that it would.

…

The world outside was large and loud, and Lorna stumbled through it even with help from Franny and, of all people, Chapman. She found a boring but steady job and fell asleep in front of _The Bachelor_ marathons, and it was a life. As much of one as she needed.

Her lines inched down the page and crossed into another, the slow tick of numbers she sometimes forgot but the ritual she couldn't, and once she had written _Dear Nicky_ instead, wondering if prisoners in max were allowed to get mail, or receive calls, or (the smallest voice in her head) see visitors.

She didn't check, and the letter stuck there, exhausted after two words.

And she wondered – foolishly, painfully – if Nicky had unwritten letters of her own, slips of the pen that left _Lorna_ in the margins of paperbacks or bathroom stalls, but it was impossible, she knew.

She was the only one waiting, the only one who couldn't forget, and this was why she needed to be locked up. This was obsession and blindness and letting her brain draw arrows between things that weren't connected and never had been.

She still marked the days – what choice did she have? – and tried to work out the math of how much time Nicky might have left and told herself that it was okay, that _this_ time she was only hurting herself.

It was in the middle of a normal conversation with Chapman – Piper, who always knew things she had no reason to and heard the questions Lorna didn't ask – that it came out, one breath's worth of _You know, Nicky's getting out on Thursday_ dropped between a treatise on organic food and asking about the family, so quiet that Lorna couldn't even be sure it had happened.

Chapman kept saying her name until she stuttered out words of excuse, enough to end the call before the phone landed on the floor, skittering under a table, and took her down with it.

 _How much time_ , _how much time_ , and it was so heavy it could swallow her. Years of not calling it love and not saying it back and not giving it more than a few notebook pages. So heavy, and yet she felt nothing except her own weight, kneeling on the floor as the light shifted patterns around her.

Eventually, she rose.

She dug out her phone and texted an apology to Chapman.

And, the next day, she went to three stores before she found the right shade of lipstick.

…

She sat in her car (well, Franny's car) at the edge of the parking lot, one hand periodically reaching for the door handle but not quite making it there, and it was a cowardice that she hated and needed in equal measure – that choice to drive away without Nicky ever seeing her.

She had come with her hair soft-curled and her lips red, trying to be the Lorna that Nicky might recognize, but they were different people now, they _had_ to be, and suddenly it all felt like too much.

Maybe she could leave and stop looking back (she _would_ ), but the gate was opening and her heart was dropping and she was as lost as she ever was.

Nicky, slouching forward in real-world clothes that didn't fit right, past the guards and barbed wire without bothering to lift her head.

She walked in a straight line towards nothing that Lorna could see, like she'd walk off the edge of the world if she could get there fast enough, and Lorna could no longer decide where the greater risk was or what to do with her hands when the glass between them felt this thin and insurmountable.

Nicky moved closer, and it was impossible for her to have _known_ , but by the time Lorna got one foot down to the pavement, Nicky was standing at the hood of her car as if this had been the plan all along.

She was harder, worn, and strange without the touch-me-not sweeps of eyeliner and laughing-smirk that Lorna kept looking for.

Her throat caught, and she was drowning under Nicky's stare.

"Hey, kid." The voice was more scratched but _hers_ , the same dry rasp that Lorna had held safe in the confines of her head for so long, and it took no more to break her.

But there _was_ more. "Been waiting long?"

(They both said _no_ when they meant _yes,_ and maybe it was a habit they could finally unlearn.)

She remembered seven hundred and ninety-one black lines and every lonesome day – and perhaps there was one to be reclaimed, this one, which marked an ending and a waking and everything she had waited for.

She remembered glass and water and saying _I love you_ to Nicky, and there was promise in every piece of it.

* * *

 _dushenka_ =little soul


End file.
